While the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to expand in both number and variety of deployed devices, keeping them powered unobtrusively is an unmet need. Practical systems have concentrated on device efficiency, often reducing function and/or performance so that the battery or device replacement cycle can be lengthened. While batteries have remained the primary energy sources due to their energy density, they are very impractical due to the requirements for periodic recharging and/or replacements in certain sensing contexts requiring the operation of such systems over a significant period of time, including autonomous sensors, biomedical implants and wearable electronics. In order to address this challenge and extend the operational lifetime, there has been an emerging research interest to harvest energy from environmental energy. In this talk, Dr. Du will introduce his research on designing energy harvestings devices, circuits & systems using CMOS and MEMS technologies for piezoelectric energy harvesting used in above-mentioned autonomous systems. His research includes improving energy efficiency, realizing system miniaturization and improving overall performance for various applications. The design details and methodology will be presented based on a selection of his published works.

Dr. Du received the B.Eng. degree and M.Sc. degree from Sorbonne University, Paris, and Imperial College London, in 2011 and 2012, respectively, where he was ranked 1st in the departments in every year. Between 2012 and 2014, he was working on digital IC design in Shanghai, China. He joined University of Cambridge for his Ph.D. research since Oct 2014 He used less than 3 years to finish his Ph.D. research and he received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cambridge in 2017. He is currently a postdoctoral scholar at Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) at University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA. His research interests include CMOS, VLSI, MEMS and system designs for autonomous sensors, wearable electronics, biomedical implants and Microrobotics. Based on his research, he has published 3 US patents and 38 journal/conference papers, and most of them are his first-authored papers. He published several papers in the top journal in the circuit design area: IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. In 2018, he presented the First Ever ISSCC conference paper from the University of Cambridge. The ISSCC is known as the “Chip Olympics” in the integrated circuit industry. Two of his patents are being commercialized through being licensed to companies.